• norimee@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Thank you for your thorough explanation.

    It’s always a bit confusing when your language has one word for something another language makes distinctions within.

    • Jake Farm@sopuli.xyz
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      2 months ago

      There is a lot of pedantry in English despite there being no central governing body over the language like French has.

      • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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        2 months ago

        Yep!

        Personally, I’m deprecating “its”.

        The “its/it’s” distinction requires violation of the apostrophe-s rule for possessive forms. This exception to that rule is entirely arbitrary. The meaning is never ambiguous in context; the distinction exists solely to enable pedantry and confuse spell checkers.

        So, English will be better off by retiring “its”, relegating it to the trash heap along with “chuse”.

        “It’s” is now a homonym. Both the contraction rules and the possessive rules for apostrophe-s construction are maintained, and the only people who will cry about it are English teachers and other worthless pedants.

        I have spoken.